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Possibly Bamforth's first film, and apparently the company's oldest surviving one, Weary Willie (1898) is a one-shot comedy based around a simple situation: a tramp contriving to obtain the sole use of a park bench by driving away its occupants so that he can get some sleep. Bamforth's film was one of the first to attempt to cash in on the popularity of a character already established in another medium. The tramp Weary Willie was originally created by the cartoonist Tom Browne, and first appeared in the magazine Illustrated Chips in 1896. The success of the character (the strip Weary Willie and Tired Tim ran until 1953, outliving its creator by nearly half a century) meant that the name passed into the popular consciousness. One of the ponies on Captain Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1911 was called Weary Willie, and during World War I a few years later, it was a nickname for German mortar bombs ("weary" because they moved relatively slowly, and "Willie" presumably for Kaiser Wilhelm II). In the 1920s, Willie became a popular American cartoon character drawn by Emmett Kelly, who later adopted Willie as his stage persona when he became a circus clown. He can be seen as Willie in The Greatest Show on Earth (US, d. Cecil B DeMille, 1952). Michael Brooke
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Complete film (1:17)
